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94 THE NEW YORKER, JULY 9 & 16, 2012
were televised, CBS didn't carry them.
ABC did; CBS ran soap operas. The tele-
vision critic of the Times, Jack Gould,
wrote that ABC, not Murrow, killed Mc-
Carthy. And even Friendly later admitted
that it was ABC s coverage, more than the
"See It Now' program he had produced,
that led to McCarthys demise.
Paley was upset by Murrows broad-
cast. CBS declined to buy newspaper ads
for the program, and when the Paleys
called Murrow after the show it was Mrs.
Paley who did the talking. Paley might
have been unhappy partly because of the
Fairness Doctrine, which required net-
works to air opposing viewpoints, some-
thing with little appeal to sponsors. (Mc-
Carthy did go on CBS to respond to
Murrow, though his loopy performance
did not help his case.)
Paley was also allergic to controversy
because he didn't want to alienate viewers
or politicians, and after 1954 he under-
took to shut Murrow and Friendly down.
The program started being moved around
on the schedule; people in the industry
began to refer to it as "See It Now and
Then." Finally, in 1958, after a stormy
argument, in Paley's office, between
Murrow and Paley, with an astonished
Friendly looking on, the show was killed.
Five months later, Murrow gave a speech
in Chicago criticizing television for "dec-
adence, escapism, and insulation from the
realities of the world in which we live,"
and Murrow and Paley, who had been
close friends since meeting in London
during the war, did not have a civil con-
versation again until just before Murrows
death, of cancer, in 1965.
T he history of television news is stud-
ded with career-damagingjournalis-
tic train wrecks. Conflict was built into
the system from the start: airtime is finite,
and some percentage had to be sold to
sponsors, most of whom preferred to be
associated with the upbeat and the non-
controversial. Paley pushed Howard K.
Smith out of CBS in 1961, because he
thought that Smith's sympathetic cover-
age of the civil-rights movement was too
opinionated. (This opened the door for
Cronkite to be named anchor.) In 1965,
CBS reassigned Safer from Vietnam to
London because of the reaction to Safer's
report on the torching by American sol-
diers of the village of Cam Ne. (Rather
replaced him.)
Paley and Stanton forced Friendly out
in 1966, when he made a fuss about CBS's
deåsion to stop broadcasting George Ken-
nan's testimony at a Senate Foreign Rela-
tions Committee hearing on the war in
Vietnam. NBC, which had little going for
it anyway in daytime programming, car-
ried the proceedings; CBS showed reruns,
including a fifth broadcast of an episode of
"I Love Lucy." Six years later, Paley ordered
anewsprogramonVVare
meroberut
down, in response to complaints from Nix-
on's aide Charles Colson. In short, Rather's
ouster after the National Guard broadcast
belongs to a distinguished tradition.
It was always a battle getting contro-
versial subjects and opinions on the air in
the era of the broadcast networks, whose
motto might have been "Offend no one."
Cable, which has a very different business
model, is another story. Since cable view-
ers are billed just to watch, no matter
which channels they prefer, opinion pays.
The makers of cable news don't need to
attract everyone; they just need to estab-
lish a loyal niche audience. A piece of
your monthly cable payment goes to Fox
News, whether you care for it or not. A
piece goes to MSNBC.
Journalism and history are about get-
ting things right. But the past has many
uses, and one of them is to inspire the
present. People in any profession like to
create an imaginary past, populated by the
Ones Who Came Before. Sometimes, we
figure these people to be narrow-minded
fools and feel motivated to demonstrate
our own superior tolerance and sophisti-
cation. More honorably, if not necessarily
more accurately, we imagine our prede-
cessors as nobler and braver than our small
and anxious selves-as men and women
who stuck up for principle and, by their
righteousness, moved the world.
At the end of the first episode of
"Newsroom," the news anchor, played
by a gruff Jeff Daniels, is congratulated
by the head of the news division, a gruff
Sam VV aterston, after an aggressive re-
port on an oil spill. A bottle of Scotch is
produced, as befits the gruffness. The
VV aterston character wants to encourage
his newsman to continue to speak his
mind on the news he reports. "Anchors
having an opinion isn't a new phenome-
non," he tells him. "Murrow had one and
that was the end of McCarthy. Cronkite
had one and that was the end of Viet-
nam." Don't let it be forgot. .